Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!merlin.usc.edu!aludra.usc.edu!alves From: alves@aludra.usc.edu (William Alves) Newsgroups: comp.music Subject: Re: tunings, cont'd Keywords: Intonation systems, octaves, tuning systems Message-ID: <6800@merlin.usc.edu> Date: 2 Dec 89 02:02:15 GMT References: <3068@husc6.harvard.edu> <6335@merlin.usc.edu> <3113@husc6.harvard.edu> <6460@merlin.usc.edu> <3194@husc6.harvard.edu> <6540@merlin.usc.edu> <3246@husc6.harvard.edu> <6676@merlin.usc.edu> <3288@husc6.harvard.edu> Sender: news@merlin.usc.edu Reply-To: alves@aludra.usc.edu (Bill Alves) Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Lines: 54 [Noam writes:] >[I wrote:] >: [...] Also, I never looked at these spectra >:explicitly for their inharmonicity. Your question as to whether these devia- >:tions would or should influence the tuning system is interesting, but I don't >:have the answer. > >Well, if you care about consonance and define it by the absence of audible >beats then I'd expect that you would be quite concerned about even subtle >inharmonicities; 6Hz difference at any frequency translates, of course, to >a very noticeable 6 beats/sec. Conversely, you may be able to locate to >within at most ~1Hz any overtone strong enough to generate beats by simply >beating it against a sinusoidal test-tone of known frequency. > Of course. That's the whole point of just tuning systems that I work in. What I meant to say, but perhaps I wasn't clear, was in reference to an earlier issue that you had brought up: have tuning systems in various cultures evolved because of the spectral characteristics of their instruments? That's the ques- tion I don't have the answer for, and I doubt if anyone really does. First, relatively very few world cultures have fixed, standardized tuning systems in practical use. Instruments which have one separate vibrating body for each pitch (keyboard instruments, zithers, mallet instruments) provide the most common need for a tuning system, and often they are not played in ensembles with other instruments of the same type. Even then (as in Indonesia and some parts of Africa) tuning systems are only standardized for a particular or- chestra of instruments. A corollary issue that I would also like to clarify is whether inharmonicity can be considered a kind of "justification" for temperament. Personally, I really don't think so, but my feeling is mostly based on empirical experience working with timbres and tuning systems in a compositional context. Just in- tervals on a piano are significantly different from tempered intervals, even if they are just a few cents off. >:Not at all. First of all, the attack is a vital part of what we hear as the >:timbre and is hard to separate from the rest of the sound. Secondly, I should >:qualify my use of "almost" by saying that very small deviations (low ampli- >:tude partials) from the sinusoidal can be very important to the timbre; i.e. >:by "almost" I didn't mean "indistinguishable." > >I guess I misunderstood. By the way, it is sometimes possible to separate >the perception of the "rest of the sound" from the initial attack, as has >been demonstrated (on the piano) by Bartok a long time back. > A very early experiment in aural perception utilizing recording technology was one in which an experimenter faded in single notes from various instru- ments on a disc recorder. The subjects frequently mistook an oboe for a flute, a trumpet for a violin, etc. I don't have the exact reference, but I'm sure that someone could point me to it. Inharmonics in the attack are crucial to what we call timbre, a fact that has been exploited in many synthesizers. Bill Alves USC School of Music / Center for Scholarly Technology Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com